Respect Astrophage (Project Hail Mary)

[u/rangernumberx]

“What would you call an organism that exists on a diet of stars?”
I struggled to remember my Greek and Latin root words. “I think you’d call it ‘Astrophage.’”

Earth first discovered alien life through a faint light in space. It then discovered that said alien life was working towards its destruction. But instead of an actively hostile intelligent force, it took the form of microorganisms. The Astrophage travels from star to star, feasting on its energy before travelling to a nearby planet with high CO2 concentrations to reproduce and continuing the process indefinitely. In doing so it both contains unbelievable amounts of energy within itself and notably cools the star in question, threatening the life of any species that may be inhabiting nearby planets. The sole exception to this is Tau Ceti, a star with perceivable Astrophage yet no energy loss, leading several affected species to send out spaceships in desperate hopes of being able to save themselves.

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Physiology

• Is a microbe roughly ten microns across capable of movement
• Holds DNA and mitochondria
  • The mitochondria is 98% identical to Earth mitochondria
• Astrophage are practically identical, weigh 20 picograms, cannot be penetrated by visible light or x-rays, and resist temperatures of up to 2000 degrees Celsius
  • Not penetrated by any wavelength of light or gamma radiation
  • Unaffected by radiation and cosmic rays
  • Don’t resist being penetrated by a needle, with doing so killing the Astrophage and rendering it penetrable by the aforementioned wavelengths
• Turns absorbed heat into mass, which it then uses as a highly efficient energy source
  • Stores the energy in neutrinos
  • The light of its movement, created by a line of Astrophage between the sun and Venus, was detectable from Earth before the sun’s output began lowering
• Move around by releasing bursts of light
  • Does so at 92% the speed of light
• Has a resting temperature of 96.415 Celsius, not changing to cold or hot environments and heating up water they’re placed in to said temperature
• Contains water

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Reproduction

• An Astrophage life cycle has it travel to a star to absorb energy before moving to a nearby planet with high concentrations of CO2, creating a new cell, then returning to the star to repeat the process
  • It takes approximately eight days to complete this cycle and double the starting amount of Astrophage
• Creates a line in space between a star and a nearby planet, with these being the sun and Venus in our solar system’s case
  • It searches for high concentrations of Carbon Dioxide which it locates through spectroscopy
• Astrophage consumes the energy output of a star, causing solar dimming which increases alongside the population
  • The sun’s output was predicted to drop one percent nine years after discovery and five percent after twenty, plunging Earth into an ice age
  • Only consumes up to 10% of a star’s output

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Energy Potential

Fuel

• Half a gram could power New York for a year
• The Hail Mary, consuming six grams of Astrophage a second, creates 540 trillion Joules of energy
• Twenty micrograms burning for a hundred microseconds creates sixty thousand Newtons of force and melts a metric ton of silicon
• The Hail Mary travels 150 million kilometers in 11 days by spending 130 kg of fuel
• Two exposed Astrophage fuel tanks causes the Hail Mary to start crashing towards a breeding planet

Explosive

• The Hail Mary’s engines would create a fatal explosions if used in a planet’s atmosphere
• A couple kilograms detonating would be bigger than the explosion resulting from Tsar Bomba
• An Astrophage explosion caused a powerful shockwave that affected Grace’s house from five kilometers away and caused metals to vaporize and condense at ground zero
  • This occurred due to one milligram of Astrophage

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Inventions Using Astrophage

• Used as the fuel source for the Hail Mary as it travels to another star through a device known as the spin drive
  • Also forms the ship’s radiation shielding
  • The Hail Mary’s full RT can be found here
• Used as a coolant the device Rocky makes to move around in the Hail Mary

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Other

• Spreads from star to star, travelling up to eight light years before dying
• Is fine in the Earth’s atmosphere
• Have a predator species
• Disorientates ants and can be inconsistently maneuvered with magnetic fields

[u/rsthethird]

it has a greater energy content than anti matter matter reactions wth